Nightingale Tracker Follows Student Nurses to Community Settings
SAN JOSE, Calif. — January 14, 1997 — Beginning this month, 10 San Jose State University nursing students will participate in a semester-long research project to test a new software application for educating nurses created by FITNE Inc., a developer of interactive technology for healthcare education based in Athens, Ohio.
FITNE developed the new application, the Nightingale Tracker, in response to changes in the delivery of health care in the United States, according to Vicky Elfrink, FITNE project manager.
Increasingly, community health care agencies have taken over much of illness care, she notes. As a result, nursing educators are turning to community settings in greater numbers to seek clinical experiences for their students. Because students now frequently travel to clinics and clients' homes at multiple distant sites, nursing faculty are concerned about how to maintain communication with their students.
Instant Office in a Box
The Nightingale Tracker project employs the Sony Magic Link PIC-2000, a hand-held device loaded with General Magic software that projects a screen that looks like a standard desktop with a telephone, rolodex, calendar, file drawer, in-and-out boxes and a web access icon. Using the device, students can be in constant contact with their instructor at a nurse-managed center through E-mail, fax and voice mail. They can simultaneously send E-mail reports to a doctor's office as they are seeing patients in their homes. The Tracker will enable nurses and nursing students to efficiently communicate and collect clinical data in community health care settings.
"This system has the potential to revolutionize the way we teach nursing," said Mary Jo Gorney-Moreno, SJSU nursing professor and campus coordinator of the project. "It will enhance the ability of faculty members to safely supervise multiple students in multiple settings."
"This project, along with our recent beta test of the ADAM physiology software for Addison-Wesley, will help SJSU nursing students to become skilled in using computers for learning, for accessing information through the Internet and for data management," Gorney-Moreno said. "Their experiences will make them highly competitive for employment in health care agencies, as the agencies move into automated information processing."
Community Health Care Pioneer
The School of Nursing at SJSU is a pioneer in the area of community-based learning through its nurse-managed centers. Anticipating the current national shift from hospital- to home-based care, the school opened its first nurse-managed center in 1978. Since then, the school has received three substantial grants to support and expand the centers.
CONTACT:
San Jose State University
Sylvia Hutchinson, 408/924-1166
Mary Jo Gorney-Moreno, 408/924-3162